This is a one year anniversary compilation album of Other People label, a label founded by Nicolas Jaar as to replace his previous label, Clown and Sunset label. Tracks from the label’s artists and Darkside (the duo by Nicolas Jaar and Dave Harrington) are included in the album.

The first half of the album is filled with relatively acoustic tracks: Soul Keita’s bluesy track, Dave Harrington (from Darkside) covering Nick Drake’s folk song having a female voice singing the song, and a Pop track with a languid mood by Visuals. Darkside provides two of their unheard tracks: “What They Say”, an IDM oriented track with less guitar sound, and “Gone Too Soon” which sounds like New Order’s “Blue Monday” with tribal beats and smoky atmosphere of Blues. My favorites are the three remixed tracks of Ancient Astronaut (an artist full of wonder): Powell’s remix which is indeed an uplifting track, but has some harshness of Industrial music, Jen Jelinek (a.k.a. Farben)’s remix which is like a hypnotic Drone music in which electromagnetic fields fall down on waves of the ocean of some Sci-Fi world, and Francis Harris’s remix which is a Minimal track expressing sand particles blowing in a windy dessert somewhere far away. The comparison between sounds of ethereal guitar and digital noise is being expressed in an exquisite manner in Dave Harrington’s solo track, “Form and Affect” which comes in at the latter half of the album.

The opener and the closer tracks are both by Nicolas Jaar, but are of recorded sounds of the President’s answering machine and a radio talk on the President’s unofficial conversation respectively. I feel that these two tracks are expressing two comparative impressions related with the President i.e. a ‘Mechanical’ (=‘Unhuman’) impression in the answering machine track, and a ‘Human’ (≒‘Humane’) impression in the radio talk track. And concerning with other tracks of the album, the first half of them (starting off with Soul Keita’s track) are the ones that make me feel human warmness, and as the album approaches to the end, tracks get to sound more abstract and electronic (like as Ancient Astronaut’s tracks). Thus, by looking at how the tracks of the album are being lined up, I have started to feel that through this album, Nicolas Jaar might have wanted to explain that the music of his label, Other People and he himself is like the music that rolls two wheels of ‘Humanness’ and ‘Unhuman-ness’ together.